The Science of Overcoming Procrastination: How to Be Disciplined, Break Inertia, Manage Your Time, and Be Productive. Get Off Your Butt and Get Things Done!

By Patrick King

Outsmart your lazy and undisciplined tendencies. Become a productivity machine and achieve your goals in record time.

Procrastination is the monster that we are always running from, but not always successfully. It lurks around every corner, and can completely sabotage your life. But you can learn to defeat it every time.

Stop wasting time. SAVE time and learn how to build momentum.

The Science of Overcoming Procrastination is a deep dive into our tendency to push things until the last minute possible. It uncovers the biological and evolutionary science behind procrastination, and how we can beat these instinctual drives to triumph in our career and personal life. A plethora of studies are analyzed and put into illuminating contexts.

Best of all, it’s a book of scientific solutions boiled down to everyday usefulness. You’ll be able to apply insight from this book immediately to slay your procrastination monster and get ahead of the pack.

Eliminate stress, anxiety, and overwhelm over falling behind or failing.

Patrick King is an internationally bestselling author and entrepreneur. His writing draws of a variety of sources, from scientific research, academic experience, coaching, and real life experience. He has battled the procrastination monster his entire life and brings proven techniques to you.

Discover discipline, willpower, and motivation that works for you.

•A scientific and biological overview of your procrastination habit.
•Warning signs to monitor your work ethic.
•Psychological tactics to trigger your brain to productivity.

Overhaul your approach to productivity and output.

•How to structure and schedule your life to safeguard against procrastination.
•Simple yet effective tactics to get off your butt and into action.
•How to beat analysis paralysis and other causes of mental freezing.

Get more done in less time so you can enjoy your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick King
• Release date: Apr 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463800577

Patrick King

Patrick King is a social interaction specialist/dating, online dating, image, and communication and social skills coach based in San Francisco, California. His work has been featured on numerous national publications such as Inc.com, and he’s achieved status as a #1 Amazon best-selling dating and relationships author. He writes frequently on dating, love, sex, and relationships. Learn more about Patrick at his website, patrickkingconsulting.com.

Book preview

The Science of Overcoming Procrastination:

How to Be Disciplined, Break Inertia, Manage Your Time, and Be Productive. Get Off Your Butt and Get Things Done!

By Patrick King

Social Interaction Specialist and Conversation Coach

www.PatrickKingConsulting.com

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Procrastination: The Ancient Foe

Chapter 2: Danger: Warning Signs

Chapter 3: Anti-Procrastination Mindsets

Chapter 4: Psychological Tactics

Chapter 5: Strategic Planning

Chapter 6: Structuring against Procrastination

Chapter 7: Get Off Your Butt

Summary Guide

Introduction

I want to start this book with a story about procrastination, but maybe I’ll tell you tomorrow…

When my mother was pregnant with me, my father promised to build a shelf in my nursery room to house all the keepsakes and memorabilia I would create as a growing human being. For instance, locks of hair from my first haircut, my baby teeth when they fell out, my first fingernail clippings, the bracelet that was put on me right after I was born, and my first pair of shoes. It seems like everything parents keep of their children is some form of refuse or garbage, but I suppose the sentimental value can’t be discounted. The shelf was also supposed to have space across the top and bottom to act as a photo album, along with a ruler running down one side to track my height.

Sounds like a pretty good idea, right? Cute, even. At least, that’s what my father thought.

He conceived of this idea when I was barely the size of a peanut, which would place my mother somewhere between two and four months of pregnancy, roughly. The shelf ended up being built after I had already lost my first tooth, which would place me at roughly seven years old.

His grand shelf had a turnaround time of almost eight years, and it can probably be assumed that he wasn’t off searching the world for the perfect tree to harvest wood from. It is also rather unlikely that he had changed his mind and wanted to wait for me to grow up so we could share the experience of building something together, though it’s an excuse that sounds as good as any.

He just procrastinated and never quite got around it. It always remained on his to-do list, but other tasks seemed to take precedence over it or have greater urgency. I later asked him how he allowed this to happen, and he said that it simply seemed like too big of a task and that everything else seemed easier to complete, so he would just perform those tasks first—washing the car, cleaning the gutters, cooking a pie. He might not have enjoyed any of those tasks, but at least they were relatively small, had a definite ending time, and he knew exactly where he could start.

Naturally, the next question I had was what motivated him to finally set his sights on finishing the shelf. It was completely related to his reason for not starting. Instead of viewing a shelf as an insurmountable task that would take up weeks of his time, he began to view it as something to do little by little. And he took this to the highest degree, buying some nails one weekend, taking some measurements another, and buying 1-2 pieces of the required lumber each month.

In other words, he took it slow and broke the overwhelming task into tiny steps that ultimately made it easy to say, Oh, what the heck, I can do this right now. Despite my father’s six years of delay tactics and absentmindedness, this is a story about how to slay the procrastination beast in a way we can all implement in our daily lives. One of the biggest weapons you have against procrastination is its natural enemy: making tasks almost impossible to skip over in the present moment. We’ll cover that in more detail later.

Perhaps it is hereditary, but procrastination has also plagued me for years in both my personal and professional life. I’m embarrassed to say that I pulled multiple all-nighters in college and never seemed to learn my lesson. Breaking tasks into tiny steps was a big factor in defeating it, but understanding the psychology behind procrastination and why we can’t seem to do what’s best for us is what will really get you to where you want to be.

Humans are many things, but acting in a way that is consistent with our intentions is not something we specialize in. It’s time to dig deep into what happens in our brains when we suddenly want to clean the bathroom to avoid our homework. You might find more than you bargained for, but the end goal will always be the same: you’ll be able to get off your butt and accomplish your goals on a consistent basis. Procrastination will hopefully be relegated to a distant memory instead of a constant battle.

Chapter 1. Procrastination: The Ancient Foe

Procrastination is opportunity’s assassin.

- Victor Kiam

If you’ve chosen to read this book, you may have met procrastination before. It probably needs no introduction, especially when you’ve known it all your life. Since the moment you were old enough to recognize that you actually have to option to build a Lego castle rather than sit down to do your math homework, procrastination has been there in the background, encouraging you to do that what is worst for you. It’s like your shadow; you just can’t shake it, it’s always with you, and it’s easy to forget about.

But unlike your shadow, it’s deadset on ruining your life!

Now you’re stuck with it and having problems because it’s starting to control you, like one of those relationships which started out fun but has grown to ruin almost every aspect of your life. You want to break up with it to get your life back on track, but you don’t know how to.

Well, the answer in knowing how to finally get back in control from the demoralizing domination of procrastination is in this book. It starts with getting to really know procrastination for what it truly is, and the many faces it shows when tricking you to hand over the reins to it again.

What is procrastination?

The term procrastination was derived from the Latin pro, meaning forward, forth, or in favor of, and crastinus, meaning of tomorrow. Its literal translation can thus be taken to be the moving forward of something to tomorrow, or favoring tomorrow as the ideal time. It’s never today; always another moment to be later determined.

Procrastination is the act or habit of putting off something to a future time. It involves delaying what needs to be done, usually because the task is unpleasant or boring—or simply because delaying is an option. It’s typically considered an exclusively negative phenomenon, involving some degree of psychological discomfort and/or irrationality. For example, the thought of having to write out a three-chapter research proposal brings psychological discomfort, so you may delay working on the task for as long as you can. You may also simply have some extra time and want to watch a movie instead.

The next thing you know, you’ve put off writing the proposal until it’s just a day before the deadline—which wasn’t exactly a rational move, given the sheer size of workload involved and the shortness of time you now have to complete it. Rationality isn’t involved in procrastinating; in fact, rationality is used far less on a daily basis than we would like to think. And thus, we find ourselves in a hole of our own digging.

Note that procrastination deals only with intended tasks (i.e. tasks you should be doing), and not all the other tasks open for you to do. For instance, delaying working on the sales report you’re expected to hand in by the end of the week is procrastinating, but putting off all other tasks you don’t intend to do—say, go around the community helping Girl Scouts sell thin mints—isn’t.

Unless, of course, helping the Girl Scouts sell ‘em cookies is actually on your to-do list, and you deliberately put off doing it—then that’s procrastination. You get the picture. The defining feature of procrastination is that it involves putting off tasks you know are better off done now. It is essentially an act of avoiding discomfort (i.e. the trouble of doing the intended task) and pursuing pleasure instead (i.e. substituting more enjoyable activities, plus the relief of not having to engage in the intended task). Who needs help with pursuing pleasure, after all? That is rarely the problem that keeps us up at night.

Why do we procrastinate?

Since the time of ancient civilizations, our ancestors have struggled with the dilemma of choosing to do what needs to be done over other, usually more pleasant, activities. We may imagine that our less industrious forebears must have had days when they relaxed lying under a tree shade instead of picking

Reviews for The Science of Overcoming Procrastination

[Raghavendra Vanam · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

. Absolutely amazing book there are way many ways to handle procrastination way - many strategies but the thing is we can't remember all strategies we can choose what works best for us